Melissa Carter, center, chats with her son William, 13, before joining her fiance Addullah Salahuddin, right, at the computer to prepare they wedding music playlist in New York. Carter, an ex-offender who was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, met Salahuddin while both were in separate ex-offender program at Fortune Society. Her success made it possible to reconnect with her children and study for an online degree. A new U.N. study shows the U.S. lagging behind other developed nation in HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment. African Americans are disproportionately affected.
Bebeto Matthews
The Associated Press

Melissa Carter, center, chats with her son William, 13, before joining her fiance Addullah Salahuddin, right, at the computer to prepare they wedding music playlist in New York. Carter, an ex-offender who was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, met Salahuddin while both were in separate ex-offender program at Fortune Society. Her success made it possible to reconnect with her children and study for an online degree. A new U.N. study shows the U.S. lagging behind other developed nation in HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment. African Americans are disproportionately affected.
Bebeto Matthews
The Associated Press

Racial disparity likely behind U.S. poor results in global AIDS fight

It should be easy more than 30 years after the world became intimately and frightfully aware of HIV/AIDS and treatments were developed that people would see continuing declines in cases of the disease.

But the U.S., which has the best health care system on the planet, lags behind other developed countries in the global battle against HIV and AIDS, a new United Nations study reports. It cites a decline in awareness and inadequate treatment as reasons.

Not surprisingly, the U.N. study notes that African Americans are more likely than other ethnic racial groups in the U.S. to be infected with HIV and 10 times more likely as whites to die from AIDS, McClatchy News Service reports.

Blame it on the health care disparity tied to race in the United States. African Americans constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population but last year accounted for 46 percent of people living with HIV in America and half of fatal AIDS-related cases.

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UNAIDS, the group that monitors HIV and AIDS worldwide, said in 2013, the U.S. accounted for 54 percent of the 88,000 new HIV infections in Western and Central Europe and North America and 69 percent of the 27,000 AIDS-related deaths in those areas.

That’s shameful. The U.S. has to do more to prevent people from getting HIV/AIDS and diagnose HIV cases sooner and provide aggressive and sustained treatment for all persons regardless of race who have the disease.